This is all true, but what is interesting is that I find that my kids get more unsupervised/loosely supervised free play at their siblings' Little League games than almost anywhere else. They don't get it as much in neighborhoods anymore, but at games, much like in the neighborhoods of old, it's not so much that no parents are watching as that they all are - a little. Groups of mixed-age kids making up their own fun on the sidelines, under bleachers, on unused fields. Rolling down hills, scaling fences to get into places they weren't supposed to be, but not like REALLY REALLY not supposed to be. I brought books to keep my youngest occupied - could I ever have guessed that he and his friend would have invented the game of "book hiding" and played it every week, or that if they did choose to read, I wouldn't have to read to my non-reader? An older friend read for him, or they sounded out words together, which would have required pulling teeth at home during homework time. At 5, spending the better part of a 2-hr game out of my sight because home base is a certain group of rocks or under a given tree, but also because there are other parents around who I trust to intervene if something really goes off the rails. At our Little League fields, the oldest kids even show up - on bikes, sans parents - an hour or more before their games start to hang out, watch the younger kids play, etc. Their parents do come watch games, but those kids have plenty of unsupervised time first.
This is spot on. I would add to informal play some anecdotes from my high school experience. We played pick up basketball all the time. If nothing else was going on...we always had basketball, 3 guys or a dozen. There were 4 courts by the campus that we went to all the time. High school kids to adult men, shooting for teams, playing with/against each other. As a 16 year old, playing adult men and interacting and working out problems with them gave me confidence and improved my game. The interactions though were extremely helpful as a 22 year old in the workplace, interacting with older males. That was the power of sport.
Do I recall correctly that there were never, ever any adults in the Peanuts strips? And although parents featured in Calvin and Hobbes, they're not particularly directive, helicopterish or overprotective?
I talked about Baseball on an old YouTube video of mine, except what I did was compare and contrast its portrayal in The Sandlot vs. Parental Guidance. I found it funny that what the parents in Parental Guidance were trying to recreate basically was The Sandlot, but because of all the conventional structure it was just a total joke.
The problem is that fun is not a rule set. If you want to change the spirit of the game then you have to build the rules from the ground up with that intention. if it is just for fun, why is there an audience? if it is not about who wins why are there teams?
Its like school itself. If your goals were to really help kids discover the world and themselves you would never come up with the structure we have. why limit the menu if the purpose is to explore? if they are supposed to make friends why is so much time dedicated to the program?
Sadly, the truth is school was never set up to explore, or learn, beyond some really basic skills. The western model of education is largely a function of intersection of values in the late agrarian and early industrial revolution eras.
I’m not trying to be condescending, I know that you know this. But I’m not sure that people realize how many of the structures we still have are so very deeply rooted in the model of storing and sorting. That was the function and purpose of early public education in European/colonial cultures. I was talking to a student recently and pointed out the fact that when you go to university the first degree you get is your bachelors degree because it used to be some thing that only young men went and did prior to getting married. Going beyond that level of study was for clerics, and people who were devoted to scholarship, and they either had to have wealth or patronage to do so, even if the patronage was that of the church.
Due to the fact that the earliest forms of public education were structured around the agrarian year, with time off in the summers, so that children could either be on farms, helping the family, with breaks in the spring, to help with planting, and usually not going back to school until at least the primary harvest was over, or they could work and contribute to the family if they were in an urban setting, during the time when the days were longer.
The ranking in sorting function is still driving mechanism behind our grading systems. Attachment to the system is so deeply entrenched that it is incredibly difficult to get parents and communities on board when we are trying to do things like standards-based, grading or mastery learning. Over and over and over again we are asked, “but … what’s his mark?“
Aligned with the fact that the school year is built on the agrarian cycle, our entire society is still using an economic model based on the agrarian year. This is why our fiscal year begins in the spring. That is when the new season begins for agriculture. The turning of the year in terms of seasons happening at the solstices, has more to do with religious and cultural, attributions to the significance of those times, and their affect on human behaviour. So we have a storing system that keeps kids in large groups under the supervision of a trusted adult, safe (presumably) during predictable times that allows the adults in their lives to go out and make money, and to set routines that enables them to balance childcare with making a living. We have a ranking system, which even when we take out some of the old value modifiers that used to be applied to programs, still requires educators to provide quantitative data that measures a child’s growth and learning – a highly subjective and individual process influenced by myriad factors, and one that is not static throughout their educational career - by assigning, a ranked numerical or alpha code in the span of one agrarian year. We place children in supposedly age-based homogenous groups predicated on a long outdated and disapproving premise that there are ineffable milestones the children do and/or must hit a particular chronological points in their lives. All of the data on the progress of all students who were born within a calendar year is then collated, and used to make claims about the efficacy of the “Education“ being provided, and the value of the individual students as learners, and eventually as human beings who are going to be part of the citizenry of a place. And those claims of efficacy, or accusations of a lack of efficacy based on interpretation of the data collated, is used to make decisions about legislation, policy, and funding up through hierarchy of power and influence, often ultimately in the hands of individuals, who have not been in a school in decades, the vast majority of whom have never been educators, or education, administrators, or curriculum, developers, or educational psychologists.
The difficulty, of course, is that children are not carrots, and learning is not a crop. Children who are born in January, are the full 12 months ahead of the kids in the same class who were born at the end of the following December. And particularly in the years encompassed by elementary school and middle school, there can be vast differences in the developmental - physical, emotional, intellectual - ranges of those kids. None of these outdated but ingrained structures take into account societal influences like poverty, trauma, the impact of particular environments on epigenetics, early childhood health, family support, etc., etc., etc. Despite studies and decades of data demonstrating the intersectional intricacies of these influences, it is in credibly difficult to get people who make decisions about funding in particular to enact the kind of changes that would put the emphasis on front loading the well-being of parents and young children and kids in public schools, investing heavily in programs, designed to maximize what we know now, and did not know when public schools were initially conceptualized, with the understanding that the return on that investment will not happen in a fiscal year, nor will it happen inside a political term of a few years, but instead it will happen over a generation. The cost return will come when those children are adults, and their health is better, they are more active participants in their communities, they are better able to make decisions, they are better able to identify their strengths and either pursue entrepreneurial opportunities, or be employable, or figure out where it is the best fit.
That last, bit is extremely important. Very often the people who are in positions of influence in terms of making decisions about implementing programming, changing policy, changing legislation, changing budgets, are people who are doing so based on their own recollections of what it was like to be a student. Teaching is interesting that way. I use electricity every day, but I would never consider myself an expert electrician. I drive a vehicle every day, but I know very well, that I am not only a poor mechanic, but I have absolutely no capacity to be an automotive engineer. I have lived in buildings all my life, but that does not make me an architect, a structural engineer, a builder, or any of the subspecialties that go into constructing buildings. My day-to-day interactions with something do not lead me to believe I am an expert. But it frequently seems that everyone who has ever been taught, whether they were taught at a public school, a private school, or homeschooling, or some combination thereof, believe themselves to be experts in the art and science of teaching. But their expertise is largely stuck in their personal experience, either when they themselves were students, or in ways, they may have been impacted by their children’s experiences as a student. Those experiences and observations are authentic, valid, but they are inherently limited. And they typically do not take into account the breadth of humanity, the things students carry into their classrooms, including learning from families, from media, from peers, etc. That combine to make each classroom cohort, a particular dynamic of needs and skill sets.
Yet we still have standardized curriculum based on chronological age. We still have kids who feel like failures as human beings because by simply being themselves, and learning at a pace that is legitimate progress for them is judged as a failure within a system designed to sort, store, and rank.
Instead of restructuring the systems, we just keep adding more and more things that students and educators have to do. Do you want to get into a good university? It’s no longer enough to have high grades. Now you have to have extraordinarily high grades to get into an alarming number of programs, plus you have to have volunteer experience because that makes you around a human and shows that you are community minded, plus you should have work experience and skills, and you need that because you also need referrals, and you should also have played sports or done something else extracurricular (the arts! social or political engagement! entrepreneurship!) with well-chosen mentors so you can get more references to prove that you’re not only focussed on school because you need to be a well-rounded human who can work independently and be an effective leader and a team player!
Educators are not only supposed to teach the curriculum, unless that’s what the parents want, we’re also supposed to nurture children emotionally, we are supposed to help them find their purpose in life, we are supposed to ensure that they feel safe, even when places, other than our classroom are not safe, we are supposed to teach them that they should never bully, they should stand up to bullying, but they cannot stand up to bullying in any way that might be perceived as bullying someone else, we need to know about what’s important to them, we need to know if they’re getting enough sleep, we need to know if they’re getting enough to eat, we should know if they’re being bullied, we should know if they have health problems, we should keep them safe from all allergens, we should keep them safe from anyone making them feel uncomfortable, we should make sure that they are always having fun, but we should make sure that they are learning everything that they need to know in that one year that we have them, we need to make sure our classrooms are dynamic and engaging, but not too dynamic and not too visually distracting, we need to make sure that we have a wide range of resources for different abilities and different interests, but make sure at the same time that none of the students feel like they are left out or that they are being diminished by materials that are not age-appropriate even if they are ability appropriate, we should make sure that we have opportunities for group, work, and partner work, but we should respect the fact that some students are introverts, while others are extroverts, we should have clear expectations and standards and discipline, but we need to make sure that it’s coming from a place of being loving, we need to be trauma informed, and we need to keep the kids who are dealing with trauma safe, we need to make sure that they are getting the help and support they need, and we need to keep the other children safe from kids who may be exhibiting behaviours that could hurt themselves or others as a direct result of trauma or other influences they are experiencing, we have to call the proper authorities if we think a child is in any danger whatsoever from themselves, or anyone else in the world, but we need to do it in a way that doesn’t further endanger the child when they go home, we need to do regular reporting about once a month, but in addition to that, we also need to make sure that we’re emailing and calling parents regularly, so that they are updated on the individual needs of their child, plus we need to maintain our teacher website, and of course we need to respond to any parents who have concerns, we need to ensure that students are engaged and are paying attention or not distracted, but we can’t take their phones because their parents want them to have them when the parents call or text during class time and because we will be liable if anything happens to the expense of device while it is in our care, we should be mindful of students, privacy and comfort levels, but we should also make sure that we are regularly patrolling student bathrooms, in case of substance use or vaping, and we have to ensure that our classrooms are spaces that are safe for our diverse population, and that we are not only culturally aware, but that we don’t allow students to engage in homophobic, xenophobic, racist, bigoted, ablest, or other wise, dehumanizing language use or behaviours while also being cognizant of the fact that some of them are doing so as a Learned expression of an interpretation of cultural or religious teachings which we must also respect. We should ask for what we need in our classroom, but we need to understand that there isn’t really funding for much of anything - there isn’t funding for food, the lunch program has to be cancelled because of budgeting decisions, there isn’t money for all of those different levelled materials for every teacher in the school, the counsellor isn’t available, the cultural room is filled, no, sorry, there are no EAs available even though we’ve had positions posted for months now. We don’t have time to do assessments on all the kids who are struggling, and documentation is legally binding, so instead as a teacher, you assess every kid in your classes and determine what adaptations those kids need specifically, and provide them, even when they don’t have a learning assistance block or access to an EA, and track them to see how effective your adaptations have been for every single student in the room. I decorate your class out of your own pocket, no, you can’t use that tool that’s really effective because we have to go to a nine month process, analyzing the privacy impact, so just make some thing yourself in your classroom. You’re a professional, we trust your judgment, until the parent complains at which point, you are guilty until proven innocent. And don’t forget, even though students are first, be sure to make time for self-care - unplug to give yourself downtime, but be sure to respond quickly. If a parent emails you at 10:30 at night, or a student has a question that they send in a panic about an assignment they’ve been working on for a month and was due a week ago. Don’t let the kid go to the next level unless they’ve met all the requirements, but what have you done to make sure that they meet all of the requirements, what adaptations have you offered? Is there anything we can do to just get them through? Because the parent is really concerned about the impact of this child having to repeat a grade, or we know that if this kid has to repeat, they’ll just stop coming to school, and they’re not yet old enough for that program we have for kids to start coming to school, so what are you doing to keep them in school? What are you doing to help keep them on track to graduate on time? And don’t forget, staff meetings are mandatory, you also have supervision duty, occasionally, you’re gonna have to cover for teachers who are away because we don’t have enough subs right now, don’t fall behind on your marking, make sure that your kids are getting really meaningful feedback that can help them actually improve their work and feel validated without feeling negatively judged, be sure that you have your lesson plans laid out, including the specific curricular objectives, but don’t make it too wordy because parents are going to understand the curricular language. Communicate regularly, but don’t overwhelm parents with too much, keep students active and ensure that you’re creating meaningful tasks for them, but at any given time, remember that you should be able to give parents several weeks of work in case the child is sick, or they decided that this was a really good time to go visit another country because there is a deal on tickets.
We know the kids need all of these things. But instead of looking at the system we have, and saying this system was never designed to provide the things that we know children actually need, so we need as an entire educational system from early childhood education, through to post secondary - and that includes the trades thank you very much - to create something that will work better for everyone.
But it will take money. And it will take time. And it will take a willingness to change a status quo that some people seem to think is an obligatory right of passage, not in terms of what kids learn academically, but because it’s something their parents and older siblings, and older members of their extended family also had to suffer through.
Learning is different from Education.
Humans learn. They learn before they are out of the womb. They learn at a blistering pace from the time they emerge from the womb until most of their neural pathways are fairly established in their early to mid 20s, with some very specific times of intensified growth. Human beings learned because we are seekers. We are curious. We are designed to keep looking. We don’t get the dopamine hit at the highest part of the arc of build up-climax-downing, we get it in that moment, just before the climax point. In learning that dopamine hit comes just at the moment when we have made the Leap from where we are across that proximal zone of learning, and we’re pretty sure we’re going to make it this time, but there’s a little but of uncertainty, too. Human beings will always choose to learn things that they find interesting.
Education is when we structure, measure, and can modify the process of transmitting, proving, and assessing whether or not individuals have learned specific content or skills.
Your point about encouraging kids to explore? That’s learning. And learning can definitely be part of interactions that are inter-generational, and involve teaching, mentoring and coaching - which are all a bit different.
Our current education model was not initially established to be concerned with people learning. And as we have learned as a society, and as professionals, we keep trying to add demands on that system, increasingly complex demands, that it was never designed to meet. Those of us in the middle of the system are trying to meet, all of the tacked on expectations within a system, not suited to meeting those expectations, while constantly being judged, and blamed for the ways that the system is failing, and watching as people in positions of power and influence. Ignore the misalignments and research in favour of getting to project their own reactions on the system, and/or ensuring their own continued employment and position by meeting the demands of voters, who may not have the understanding about the ways that education has, and needs to continue to change, and the ways that investing in society is a long haul investment, rather than a short term promise to put a relative pittance back in the pockets of individuals.
So, of course, everything is dedicated to the programs. We have to justify every bit of funding, we have to prove with data, with quantifiable, measurable, observable and specific results, that everything we are doing in schools has a value that directly links back to curriculum, policy, legislation, and very often to the political influences most closely attached to the administration of particular districts.
The difficulty is that true learning, the stuff, the kids really take with them, the stuff the kids talk to me about years after they’ve left school, and things like making friends - that’s not quantifiable. It’s also dynamic, and sometimes it changes not only from year to year, but from month to month and week to week and day to day. But for it to “count” when it comes to budget, requests, and policy shifts, there has to be something you can put in a database and describe with jargonistic terminology that makes it sound as though you’re writing a legal brief.
So, we have kids who are learning, we have kids, who have incredible capacity, and curiosity, and passion, who are so terrified of being failures that they are frozen. We have generations of kids who don’t understand that learning is about making mistakes, and then improving, they think it means you have to be right the first time, or already know it somehow, because otherwise, everyone is going to be mad at you. We have teachers who are coming in every day and sacrificing their health and well-being to take care of the wide ranging needs of every kid in their class, while also, ensuring that they are providing administrators with the information, the documentation, and the routine organization that allows the administrators to do their job an answer to their bosses. And we work with parents who love their kids, who are trying their best, who are often overwhelmed, and under supported, who sometimes turn to us, as though we are counsellors, or who, sometimes use us as the safe target for their vitriol, their frustrations, and their fears.
Perhaps that is the greatest tragedy of all Dash the education system, introduces children to the idea at a very young age that systems come before humanity. Everyone involved in the system, all the way up to the highest ranking politicians, are human beings who have needs, and fears, things that they want to learn, things that they have learned, demands on their attention, and pressures to behave in particular ways.
We can’t fix it until we recognize how detrimental these established systems are, and until people are willing to let go of their white knuckled grip on power, on being right, on their fears of change, and embrace something different.
We know that it can be done. It has been done and is being done in places around the world. We have exemplars of better systems for education, for healthcare, for justice, for energy use, etc. But it requires significant change, it requires significant investment, and it requires us having a very clear understanding of what hasn’t worked, why it hasn’t worked, and why something different is important enough to support each other through that change.
Peter, This is Claude Stephens at Bernheim Forest and Arboretum. You stayed here and spoke at the Idea Festival in 2017 and helped us launch Bernheim's Children at Play Network. We are still at it and now creating a 17-acre nature play area that we are also positioning as a nature based free play research platform. I know you are careful with your time and I respect that. Would you entertain a conversation with me about our work and the possibility of visiting in October of 2025 for the International Play Association USA Chapter conference? I do so appreciate your work and commitment to free play. My email is cstephens@bernheim.org
While not sports related, this vid about computers in 1982 has a fascinating bit starting at 5:00 about how the kids have to ask other kids how to do things on the computer, they can't ask adults. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yad9p5UKk1M
Another thing I remember from unstructured play as a child, and some thing I’ve observed often since then, is that when kids are engaged in what we may call imaginative play, they don’t simply dive fully into the role-play. They do as much discussion about what the rules should be, what the rules are, what responsibilities each role has in the kind of imaginary circumstance they are creating. This goes to what you’re saying about the need for them to negotiate, shared understanding and build consensus, but it’s also often really fascinating to hear them discuss what they think “should” be acceptable behaviour for certain roles. Whether or not they intend to, they’re often pulling from tropes, stereotypes, and archetypes, they have heard, I reviewed, or observed within their lived experiences, and from a very young age they have clear and specific ideas about what particular types of people, animals, characters, even inanimate objects, are supposed to do or say, or how they are supposed to serve, in the given circumstances that they have built by consensus.
They also engage in a really interesting process of choose-your-own-adventure, slipping in and out of role dynamically as they make choices based on the ‘offers’ (as one says an improv) provided by the other participants involved in the imaginative play.
It’s fascinating, because although it is unstructured play, where they are interacting and engaged in social negotiation with each other, often without adult interference, it’s still very evident that what they have learned from adults is influencing their play in profound ways. Simultaneously, as they navigate the process of building consensus, hearing other peoples perspectives on those archetypes, those stereotypes, those expectations, you can watch and listen to them, processing challenges to their existing thought patterns, and either incorporating, engaging in give-and-take, or finding like-minded playmates with whom they form alliances, as strange as that may sound when talking about children. I can certainly remember heated arguments, both that I was a part of, and that I observed as a kid, that, rather than being about the rules of a game, we’re literally about the rules of social structures and social interactions, including power dynamics, even though they weren’t necessarily articulating that.
As you say, of course, there were individuals who disrupted the dynamic, or there were times, when consensus couldn’t be reached, and sometimes you could see where kids were drawing a line, usually protecting some thing they had been taught to believe by someone they loved, trusted, admired. “My….says ….., so you’re wrong!”
That’s, not only do kids learn a whole bevvy of important skills in unstructured play, but when adults observe them without interfering, without making snap judgment, we can often learn things about the kids we care about that, perhaps had not been obvious, or we had not observed in different contexts.
Peter, your description evoked many memories of my childhood and is "spot on" as Shawn says. Yes, as I read it, I remembered the occasional bullying and "failures", but I also recalled that we didn't tolerate bullies for very long and my failures were learning experiences that eventually led me to teacher opportunities.
I love your perspective on there being no teams. So true, and I had never fully thought through the implications for us as adults of our focus on making the game happen rather than having a winning/losing element. Thank you.
Also, your reference to being free to quit makes me think of how traditional schooling conflates grit with character, making quitting unnecessarily hard (or impossible due to seat time requirements), and how this harms our decision-making ability. Check out Annie Dukes...
Hi Jim, I found this an interesting topic, because I am constantly juggling several interests and having to decide what do I attend to now, and what should I attend to next ? Sometimes when I get stuck or too frustrated with trying to understand something, it seems preferable to quit that interest for awhile, or at least put it on a shelf. On the other hand, if I don't stick with something long enough to be able to make recognizable progress, then I begin to think What am I doing? I must somehow have a false sense of what my true interests are - and then I go "Meta" for awhile, to try to reevaluate what my true interests and values are, and to some extent whether I have the requisite ability. Sometimes I think I can understand the desire to just take a "course" in something and let someone else decide whether I've learned anything - except that actually, I've tried that before and it didn't work for me: I recognized too painfully the difference between being able to get an "A", and actually knowing or understanding anything.
I'm 53 yrs old (ok, 54 in a month) and play paddleball & racquetball 3-4x/week. Our games are informal and when I play paddleball, it's doubles. There's usually a group of 5-6 of us, so we'll rotate in, take a break, change partners, etc. (lesson 4). We try not to hurt each other or do mean stuff (Lesson 1, tho sometimes, as a goof we'll do something "mean" like hit an opponent with the ball, but it's in jest) . The rules are well known, so we don't really debate rules, but the people that are fun to play with will "argue" over calls or the score; but no one is deadly serious (Lessons 2 & 3). Lesson 5 is obvious for us on the court.
This is all true, but what is interesting is that I find that my kids get more unsupervised/loosely supervised free play at their siblings' Little League games than almost anywhere else. They don't get it as much in neighborhoods anymore, but at games, much like in the neighborhoods of old, it's not so much that no parents are watching as that they all are - a little. Groups of mixed-age kids making up their own fun on the sidelines, under bleachers, on unused fields. Rolling down hills, scaling fences to get into places they weren't supposed to be, but not like REALLY REALLY not supposed to be. I brought books to keep my youngest occupied - could I ever have guessed that he and his friend would have invented the game of "book hiding" and played it every week, or that if they did choose to read, I wouldn't have to read to my non-reader? An older friend read for him, or they sounded out words together, which would have required pulling teeth at home during homework time. At 5, spending the better part of a 2-hr game out of my sight because home base is a certain group of rocks or under a given tree, but also because there are other parents around who I trust to intervene if something really goes off the rails. At our Little League fields, the oldest kids even show up - on bikes, sans parents - an hour or more before their games start to hang out, watch the younger kids play, etc. Their parents do come watch games, but those kids have plenty of unsupervised time first.
This is spot on. I would add to informal play some anecdotes from my high school experience. We played pick up basketball all the time. If nothing else was going on...we always had basketball, 3 guys or a dozen. There were 4 courts by the campus that we went to all the time. High school kids to adult men, shooting for teams, playing with/against each other. As a 16 year old, playing adult men and interacting and working out problems with them gave me confidence and improved my game. The interactions though were extremely helpful as a 22 year old in the workplace, interacting with older males. That was the power of sport.
Another great précis, thanks Peter.
Do I recall correctly that there were never, ever any adults in the Peanuts strips? And although parents featured in Calvin and Hobbes, they're not particularly directive, helicopterish or overprotective?
Yes, and in the 1950s, when the Peanuts strip began, the depiction of kids adventuring without adults was accurate.
I talked about Baseball on an old YouTube video of mine, except what I did was compare and contrast its portrayal in The Sandlot vs. Parental Guidance. I found it funny that what the parents in Parental Guidance were trying to recreate basically was The Sandlot, but because of all the conventional structure it was just a total joke.
The problem is that fun is not a rule set. If you want to change the spirit of the game then you have to build the rules from the ground up with that intention. if it is just for fun, why is there an audience? if it is not about who wins why are there teams?
Its like school itself. If your goals were to really help kids discover the world and themselves you would never come up with the structure we have. why limit the menu if the purpose is to explore? if they are supposed to make friends why is so much time dedicated to the program?
Sadly, the truth is school was never set up to explore, or learn, beyond some really basic skills. The western model of education is largely a function of intersection of values in the late agrarian and early industrial revolution eras.
I’m not trying to be condescending, I know that you know this. But I’m not sure that people realize how many of the structures we still have are so very deeply rooted in the model of storing and sorting. That was the function and purpose of early public education in European/colonial cultures. I was talking to a student recently and pointed out the fact that when you go to university the first degree you get is your bachelors degree because it used to be some thing that only young men went and did prior to getting married. Going beyond that level of study was for clerics, and people who were devoted to scholarship, and they either had to have wealth or patronage to do so, even if the patronage was that of the church.
Due to the fact that the earliest forms of public education were structured around the agrarian year, with time off in the summers, so that children could either be on farms, helping the family, with breaks in the spring, to help with planting, and usually not going back to school until at least the primary harvest was over, or they could work and contribute to the family if they were in an urban setting, during the time when the days were longer.
The ranking in sorting function is still driving mechanism behind our grading systems. Attachment to the system is so deeply entrenched that it is incredibly difficult to get parents and communities on board when we are trying to do things like standards-based, grading or mastery learning. Over and over and over again we are asked, “but … what’s his mark?“
Aligned with the fact that the school year is built on the agrarian cycle, our entire society is still using an economic model based on the agrarian year. This is why our fiscal year begins in the spring. That is when the new season begins for agriculture. The turning of the year in terms of seasons happening at the solstices, has more to do with religious and cultural, attributions to the significance of those times, and their affect on human behaviour. So we have a storing system that keeps kids in large groups under the supervision of a trusted adult, safe (presumably) during predictable times that allows the adults in their lives to go out and make money, and to set routines that enables them to balance childcare with making a living. We have a ranking system, which even when we take out some of the old value modifiers that used to be applied to programs, still requires educators to provide quantitative data that measures a child’s growth and learning – a highly subjective and individual process influenced by myriad factors, and one that is not static throughout their educational career - by assigning, a ranked numerical or alpha code in the span of one agrarian year. We place children in supposedly age-based homogenous groups predicated on a long outdated and disapproving premise that there are ineffable milestones the children do and/or must hit a particular chronological points in their lives. All of the data on the progress of all students who were born within a calendar year is then collated, and used to make claims about the efficacy of the “Education“ being provided, and the value of the individual students as learners, and eventually as human beings who are going to be part of the citizenry of a place. And those claims of efficacy, or accusations of a lack of efficacy based on interpretation of the data collated, is used to make decisions about legislation, policy, and funding up through hierarchy of power and influence, often ultimately in the hands of individuals, who have not been in a school in decades, the vast majority of whom have never been educators, or education, administrators, or curriculum, developers, or educational psychologists.
The difficulty, of course, is that children are not carrots, and learning is not a crop. Children who are born in January, are the full 12 months ahead of the kids in the same class who were born at the end of the following December. And particularly in the years encompassed by elementary school and middle school, there can be vast differences in the developmental - physical, emotional, intellectual - ranges of those kids. None of these outdated but ingrained structures take into account societal influences like poverty, trauma, the impact of particular environments on epigenetics, early childhood health, family support, etc., etc., etc. Despite studies and decades of data demonstrating the intersectional intricacies of these influences, it is in credibly difficult to get people who make decisions about funding in particular to enact the kind of changes that would put the emphasis on front loading the well-being of parents and young children and kids in public schools, investing heavily in programs, designed to maximize what we know now, and did not know when public schools were initially conceptualized, with the understanding that the return on that investment will not happen in a fiscal year, nor will it happen inside a political term of a few years, but instead it will happen over a generation. The cost return will come when those children are adults, and their health is better, they are more active participants in their communities, they are better able to make decisions, they are better able to identify their strengths and either pursue entrepreneurial opportunities, or be employable, or figure out where it is the best fit.
That last, bit is extremely important. Very often the people who are in positions of influence in terms of making decisions about implementing programming, changing policy, changing legislation, changing budgets, are people who are doing so based on their own recollections of what it was like to be a student. Teaching is interesting that way. I use electricity every day, but I would never consider myself an expert electrician. I drive a vehicle every day, but I know very well, that I am not only a poor mechanic, but I have absolutely no capacity to be an automotive engineer. I have lived in buildings all my life, but that does not make me an architect, a structural engineer, a builder, or any of the subspecialties that go into constructing buildings. My day-to-day interactions with something do not lead me to believe I am an expert. But it frequently seems that everyone who has ever been taught, whether they were taught at a public school, a private school, or homeschooling, or some combination thereof, believe themselves to be experts in the art and science of teaching. But their expertise is largely stuck in their personal experience, either when they themselves were students, or in ways, they may have been impacted by their children’s experiences as a student. Those experiences and observations are authentic, valid, but they are inherently limited. And they typically do not take into account the breadth of humanity, the things students carry into their classrooms, including learning from families, from media, from peers, etc. That combine to make each classroom cohort, a particular dynamic of needs and skill sets.
Yet we still have standardized curriculum based on chronological age. We still have kids who feel like failures as human beings because by simply being themselves, and learning at a pace that is legitimate progress for them is judged as a failure within a system designed to sort, store, and rank.
Instead of restructuring the systems, we just keep adding more and more things that students and educators have to do. Do you want to get into a good university? It’s no longer enough to have high grades. Now you have to have extraordinarily high grades to get into an alarming number of programs, plus you have to have volunteer experience because that makes you around a human and shows that you are community minded, plus you should have work experience and skills, and you need that because you also need referrals, and you should also have played sports or done something else extracurricular (the arts! social or political engagement! entrepreneurship!) with well-chosen mentors so you can get more references to prove that you’re not only focussed on school because you need to be a well-rounded human who can work independently and be an effective leader and a team player!
Educators are not only supposed to teach the curriculum, unless that’s what the parents want, we’re also supposed to nurture children emotionally, we are supposed to help them find their purpose in life, we are supposed to ensure that they feel safe, even when places, other than our classroom are not safe, we are supposed to teach them that they should never bully, they should stand up to bullying, but they cannot stand up to bullying in any way that might be perceived as bullying someone else, we need to know about what’s important to them, we need to know if they’re getting enough sleep, we need to know if they’re getting enough to eat, we should know if they’re being bullied, we should know if they have health problems, we should keep them safe from all allergens, we should keep them safe from anyone making them feel uncomfortable, we should make sure that they are always having fun, but we should make sure that they are learning everything that they need to know in that one year that we have them, we need to make sure our classrooms are dynamic and engaging, but not too dynamic and not too visually distracting, we need to make sure that we have a wide range of resources for different abilities and different interests, but make sure at the same time that none of the students feel like they are left out or that they are being diminished by materials that are not age-appropriate even if they are ability appropriate, we should make sure that we have opportunities for group, work, and partner work, but we should respect the fact that some students are introverts, while others are extroverts, we should have clear expectations and standards and discipline, but we need to make sure that it’s coming from a place of being loving, we need to be trauma informed, and we need to keep the kids who are dealing with trauma safe, we need to make sure that they are getting the help and support they need, and we need to keep the other children safe from kids who may be exhibiting behaviours that could hurt themselves or others as a direct result of trauma or other influences they are experiencing, we have to call the proper authorities if we think a child is in any danger whatsoever from themselves, or anyone else in the world, but we need to do it in a way that doesn’t further endanger the child when they go home, we need to do regular reporting about once a month, but in addition to that, we also need to make sure that we’re emailing and calling parents regularly, so that they are updated on the individual needs of their child, plus we need to maintain our teacher website, and of course we need to respond to any parents who have concerns, we need to ensure that students are engaged and are paying attention or not distracted, but we can’t take their phones because their parents want them to have them when the parents call or text during class time and because we will be liable if anything happens to the expense of device while it is in our care, we should be mindful of students, privacy and comfort levels, but we should also make sure that we are regularly patrolling student bathrooms, in case of substance use or vaping, and we have to ensure that our classrooms are spaces that are safe for our diverse population, and that we are not only culturally aware, but that we don’t allow students to engage in homophobic, xenophobic, racist, bigoted, ablest, or other wise, dehumanizing language use or behaviours while also being cognizant of the fact that some of them are doing so as a Learned expression of an interpretation of cultural or religious teachings which we must also respect. We should ask for what we need in our classroom, but we need to understand that there isn’t really funding for much of anything - there isn’t funding for food, the lunch program has to be cancelled because of budgeting decisions, there isn’t money for all of those different levelled materials for every teacher in the school, the counsellor isn’t available, the cultural room is filled, no, sorry, there are no EAs available even though we’ve had positions posted for months now. We don’t have time to do assessments on all the kids who are struggling, and documentation is legally binding, so instead as a teacher, you assess every kid in your classes and determine what adaptations those kids need specifically, and provide them, even when they don’t have a learning assistance block or access to an EA, and track them to see how effective your adaptations have been for every single student in the room. I decorate your class out of your own pocket, no, you can’t use that tool that’s really effective because we have to go to a nine month process, analyzing the privacy impact, so just make some thing yourself in your classroom. You’re a professional, we trust your judgment, until the parent complains at which point, you are guilty until proven innocent. And don’t forget, even though students are first, be sure to make time for self-care - unplug to give yourself downtime, but be sure to respond quickly. If a parent emails you at 10:30 at night, or a student has a question that they send in a panic about an assignment they’ve been working on for a month and was due a week ago. Don’t let the kid go to the next level unless they’ve met all the requirements, but what have you done to make sure that they meet all of the requirements, what adaptations have you offered? Is there anything we can do to just get them through? Because the parent is really concerned about the impact of this child having to repeat a grade, or we know that if this kid has to repeat, they’ll just stop coming to school, and they’re not yet old enough for that program we have for kids to start coming to school, so what are you doing to keep them in school? What are you doing to help keep them on track to graduate on time? And don’t forget, staff meetings are mandatory, you also have supervision duty, occasionally, you’re gonna have to cover for teachers who are away because we don’t have enough subs right now, don’t fall behind on your marking, make sure that your kids are getting really meaningful feedback that can help them actually improve their work and feel validated without feeling negatively judged, be sure that you have your lesson plans laid out, including the specific curricular objectives, but don’t make it too wordy because parents are going to understand the curricular language. Communicate regularly, but don’t overwhelm parents with too much, keep students active and ensure that you’re creating meaningful tasks for them, but at any given time, remember that you should be able to give parents several weeks of work in case the child is sick, or they decided that this was a really good time to go visit another country because there is a deal on tickets.
We know the kids need all of these things. But instead of looking at the system we have, and saying this system was never designed to provide the things that we know children actually need, so we need as an entire educational system from early childhood education, through to post secondary - and that includes the trades thank you very much - to create something that will work better for everyone.
But it will take money. And it will take time. And it will take a willingness to change a status quo that some people seem to think is an obligatory right of passage, not in terms of what kids learn academically, but because it’s something their parents and older siblings, and older members of their extended family also had to suffer through.
Learning is different from Education.
Humans learn. They learn before they are out of the womb. They learn at a blistering pace from the time they emerge from the womb until most of their neural pathways are fairly established in their early to mid 20s, with some very specific times of intensified growth. Human beings learned because we are seekers. We are curious. We are designed to keep looking. We don’t get the dopamine hit at the highest part of the arc of build up-climax-downing, we get it in that moment, just before the climax point. In learning that dopamine hit comes just at the moment when we have made the Leap from where we are across that proximal zone of learning, and we’re pretty sure we’re going to make it this time, but there’s a little but of uncertainty, too. Human beings will always choose to learn things that they find interesting.
Education is when we structure, measure, and can modify the process of transmitting, proving, and assessing whether or not individuals have learned specific content or skills.
Your point about encouraging kids to explore? That’s learning. And learning can definitely be part of interactions that are inter-generational, and involve teaching, mentoring and coaching - which are all a bit different.
Our current education model was not initially established to be concerned with people learning. And as we have learned as a society, and as professionals, we keep trying to add demands on that system, increasingly complex demands, that it was never designed to meet. Those of us in the middle of the system are trying to meet, all of the tacked on expectations within a system, not suited to meeting those expectations, while constantly being judged, and blamed for the ways that the system is failing, and watching as people in positions of power and influence. Ignore the misalignments and research in favour of getting to project their own reactions on the system, and/or ensuring their own continued employment and position by meeting the demands of voters, who may not have the understanding about the ways that education has, and needs to continue to change, and the ways that investing in society is a long haul investment, rather than a short term promise to put a relative pittance back in the pockets of individuals.
So, of course, everything is dedicated to the programs. We have to justify every bit of funding, we have to prove with data, with quantifiable, measurable, observable and specific results, that everything we are doing in schools has a value that directly links back to curriculum, policy, legislation, and very often to the political influences most closely attached to the administration of particular districts.
The difficulty is that true learning, the stuff, the kids really take with them, the stuff the kids talk to me about years after they’ve left school, and things like making friends - that’s not quantifiable. It’s also dynamic, and sometimes it changes not only from year to year, but from month to month and week to week and day to day. But for it to “count” when it comes to budget, requests, and policy shifts, there has to be something you can put in a database and describe with jargonistic terminology that makes it sound as though you’re writing a legal brief.
So, we have kids who are learning, we have kids, who have incredible capacity, and curiosity, and passion, who are so terrified of being failures that they are frozen. We have generations of kids who don’t understand that learning is about making mistakes, and then improving, they think it means you have to be right the first time, or already know it somehow, because otherwise, everyone is going to be mad at you. We have teachers who are coming in every day and sacrificing their health and well-being to take care of the wide ranging needs of every kid in their class, while also, ensuring that they are providing administrators with the information, the documentation, and the routine organization that allows the administrators to do their job an answer to their bosses. And we work with parents who love their kids, who are trying their best, who are often overwhelmed, and under supported, who sometimes turn to us, as though we are counsellors, or who, sometimes use us as the safe target for their vitriol, their frustrations, and their fears.
Perhaps that is the greatest tragedy of all Dash the education system, introduces children to the idea at a very young age that systems come before humanity. Everyone involved in the system, all the way up to the highest ranking politicians, are human beings who have needs, and fears, things that they want to learn, things that they have learned, demands on their attention, and pressures to behave in particular ways.
We can’t fix it until we recognize how detrimental these established systems are, and until people are willing to let go of their white knuckled grip on power, on being right, on their fears of change, and embrace something different.
We know that it can be done. It has been done and is being done in places around the world. We have exemplars of better systems for education, for healthcare, for justice, for energy use, etc. But it requires significant change, it requires significant investment, and it requires us having a very clear understanding of what hasn’t worked, why it hasn’t worked, and why something different is important enough to support each other through that change.
Wow, thank you so much for all that you've written,it was an interetesting read!
Finite vs infinite games. In the finite game, the goal is to win. In the infinite game, the goal is to keep the game going.
Peter, This is Claude Stephens at Bernheim Forest and Arboretum. You stayed here and spoke at the Idea Festival in 2017 and helped us launch Bernheim's Children at Play Network. We are still at it and now creating a 17-acre nature play area that we are also positioning as a nature based free play research platform. I know you are careful with your time and I respect that. Would you entertain a conversation with me about our work and the possibility of visiting in October of 2025 for the International Play Association USA Chapter conference? I do so appreciate your work and commitment to free play. My email is cstephens@bernheim.org
Zero-Sum Game versus Positive-Sum Game
While not sports related, this vid about computers in 1982 has a fascinating bit starting at 5:00 about how the kids have to ask other kids how to do things on the computer, they can't ask adults. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yad9p5UKk1M
Another thing I remember from unstructured play as a child, and some thing I’ve observed often since then, is that when kids are engaged in what we may call imaginative play, they don’t simply dive fully into the role-play. They do as much discussion about what the rules should be, what the rules are, what responsibilities each role has in the kind of imaginary circumstance they are creating. This goes to what you’re saying about the need for them to negotiate, shared understanding and build consensus, but it’s also often really fascinating to hear them discuss what they think “should” be acceptable behaviour for certain roles. Whether or not they intend to, they’re often pulling from tropes, stereotypes, and archetypes, they have heard, I reviewed, or observed within their lived experiences, and from a very young age they have clear and specific ideas about what particular types of people, animals, characters, even inanimate objects, are supposed to do or say, or how they are supposed to serve, in the given circumstances that they have built by consensus.
They also engage in a really interesting process of choose-your-own-adventure, slipping in and out of role dynamically as they make choices based on the ‘offers’ (as one says an improv) provided by the other participants involved in the imaginative play.
It’s fascinating, because although it is unstructured play, where they are interacting and engaged in social negotiation with each other, often without adult interference, it’s still very evident that what they have learned from adults is influencing their play in profound ways. Simultaneously, as they navigate the process of building consensus, hearing other peoples perspectives on those archetypes, those stereotypes, those expectations, you can watch and listen to them, processing challenges to their existing thought patterns, and either incorporating, engaging in give-and-take, or finding like-minded playmates with whom they form alliances, as strange as that may sound when talking about children. I can certainly remember heated arguments, both that I was a part of, and that I observed as a kid, that, rather than being about the rules of a game, we’re literally about the rules of social structures and social interactions, including power dynamics, even though they weren’t necessarily articulating that.
As you say, of course, there were individuals who disrupted the dynamic, or there were times, when consensus couldn’t be reached, and sometimes you could see where kids were drawing a line, usually protecting some thing they had been taught to believe by someone they loved, trusted, admired. “My….says ….., so you’re wrong!”
That’s, not only do kids learn a whole bevvy of important skills in unstructured play, but when adults observe them without interfering, without making snap judgment, we can often learn things about the kids we care about that, perhaps had not been obvious, or we had not observed in different contexts.
Peter, your description evoked many memories of my childhood and is "spot on" as Shawn says. Yes, as I read it, I remembered the occasional bullying and "failures", but I also recalled that we didn't tolerate bullies for very long and my failures were learning experiences that eventually led me to teacher opportunities.
I love your perspective on there being no teams. So true, and I had never fully thought through the implications for us as adults of our focus on making the game happen rather than having a winning/losing element. Thank you.
Also, your reference to being free to quit makes me think of how traditional schooling conflates grit with character, making quitting unnecessarily hard (or impossible due to seat time requirements), and how this harms our decision-making ability. Check out Annie Dukes...
https://www.annieduke.com/books/
Hi Jim, I found this an interesting topic, because I am constantly juggling several interests and having to decide what do I attend to now, and what should I attend to next ? Sometimes when I get stuck or too frustrated with trying to understand something, it seems preferable to quit that interest for awhile, or at least put it on a shelf. On the other hand, if I don't stick with something long enough to be able to make recognizable progress, then I begin to think What am I doing? I must somehow have a false sense of what my true interests are - and then I go "Meta" for awhile, to try to reevaluate what my true interests and values are, and to some extent whether I have the requisite ability. Sometimes I think I can understand the desire to just take a "course" in something and let someone else decide whether I've learned anything - except that actually, I've tried that before and it didn't work for me: I recognized too painfully the difference between being able to get an "A", and actually knowing or understanding anything.
HAHAHAH!
I'm 53 yrs old (ok, 54 in a month) and play paddleball & racquetball 3-4x/week. Our games are informal and when I play paddleball, it's doubles. There's usually a group of 5-6 of us, so we'll rotate in, take a break, change partners, etc. (lesson 4). We try not to hurt each other or do mean stuff (Lesson 1, tho sometimes, as a goof we'll do something "mean" like hit an opponent with the ball, but it's in jest) . The rules are well known, so we don't really debate rules, but the people that are fun to play with will "argue" over calls or the score; but no one is deadly serious (Lessons 2 & 3). Lesson 5 is obvious for us on the court.